Multiplexing Capacity of Hybrid PD-SCMA Heterogeneous Networks

Hybrid multiple access schemes are considered potential technologies towards achieving optimal spectrum sharing for future heterogeneous networks. Multiple users are multiplexed on a single resource unit in the code domain for sparse code multiple access (SCMA) or power domain for power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (PD-NOMA) and in both domains for the hybrid power domain sparse code non-orthogonal multiple access (PD-SCMA). This allows for effective spectrum usage but comes at a cost of increased detection complexity resulting in loss of performance in terms of outages. It is therefore imperative to determine the user multiplexing capacity for effective performance. This work investigates codebook capacity bounds in small cells, pairing and power capacity bounds for the number of small cell user equipment’s (SUEs) and macro cell user equipment’s (MUEs) that can be multiplexed on a codebook for the developed PD-SCMA technology. Closed-form solutions for codebook, pairing and power multiplexing capacity bounds are derived. The performance of the system results into low outage when the system’s point of operation is within the multiplexing bounds. To alleviate the resource allocation (RA) challenges of such a system at the transmitter, dual parameter ranking (DPR) and alternate search method (ASM) based RA schemes are proposed. The results show significant capacity gain with DPR-RA in comparison with conventional schemes.